The Canyon ReviewStatic hosting shootout, free tiers included
Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages and an S3 bucket, ranked for actually-static sites. Bandwidth fine print exposed.
For a genuinely static site, Cloudflare Pages wins, GitHub Pages is the honest runner-up, and the interesting question is why anyone pays $19 per seat to host HTML. Verdict placed; details below.
Scope discipline: this ranking is for static output (SSG builds, docs, marketing pages, portfolios). The moment you need server rendering or edge functions as a primary feature, you're shopping in a different aisle and the free tiers below stop meaning anything.
Criteria: free tier honesty 35%, bandwidth pricing past free 30%, build pipeline 20%, custom domain and TLS friction 15%. As of February 2026.
The table
| Rank | Host | Free tier | First paid cliff |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cloudflare Pages | unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds/mo | $20/mo (builds, seats) |
| 2 | GitHub Pages | soft 100 GB/mo | there isn't one, it's just soft |
| 3 | Netlify | 100 GB bandwidth | $19/seat/mo |
| 4 | Vercel | 100 GB, hobby = non-commercial | $20/seat/mo |
| 5 | S3 + CloudFront | 1 TB CloudFront free | pennies, plus your afternoon |
The bandwidth fine print
The 100 GB free tiers are plenty until one page works on social media. A single good day at 2 MB per page view eats 50 GB, and Netlify and Vercel both meter overages while Cloudflare's free bandwidth is unmetered as policy. That single line is most of why rank one is rank one.
Vercel's hobby tier is non-commercial by license. Your side project with a Stripe link is arguably commercial; enforcement is polite but real. Read the terms on the pricing page before you find out during a launch.
What the per-seat price buys
Netlify and Vercel at $19-20 per seat are excellent products whose value is the preview-deploy workflow and the build platform, not the hosting. For a docs site edited by two people, that's $480 a year for CI you already have. For a 12-person product team living in preview deploys, it can be the best money in the budget. Price the workflow, not the bytes.
S3 plus CloudFront remains the tinkerer's floor: real costs at static-site scale round to a dollar, and CloudFront's permanent free tier covers 1 TB monthly. You pay in setup afternoon and in nobody else on the team wanting to touch it.
The skip
Paying seat pricing to host a static site nobody previews. If your
deploy is git push and your review process is "look at prod," the
free tiers above are not a compromise, they're the correct product.
Spend the $19 on error tracking instead; we
ranked those too.